A hospital in West Virginia refuses to treat a sick Asian-American child. Desperate, the baby’s mother seeks out a doctor practicing alternative medicine in the backwoods. Speaking only her native Chinese, she begs him to help. If that moving scene is familiar, you might have seen it in the movie Patch Adams, released in December. The doctor is Robin Williams, and the despairing mother is Doreen Foo Croft, an actress with a most unusual résumé.
Eight years ago, Croft was preparing to retire as founder and director of the early childhood education program at De Anza Community College in Cupertino, Calif., when a colleague said, in passing, “You should go into acting. I hear Asians are hot.” Croft, who is Chinese-American, laughed it off.
But a week later, she read about an acting class and enrolled. Within eight months, Croft was cast in her first role, a shopkeeper’s wife on the television series Midnight Caller. Since then, she has appeared in a dozen films and TV shows, including Nash Bridges, as well as commercials and stage plays. Her typical part: an elderly woman who speaks only Chinese or broken English. “I know how to yell in Chinese pretty well, though I hope that one day I get a part where I can speak like I actually speak,” says Croft, who is a third-generation Californian and speaks perfect, unaccented English.
Croft majored in psychology at Stanford and, after graduating, married classmate Ken Croft. Theirs was the first interracial wedding at Memorial Church, and they had two daughters together. (They are now divorced.) After working briefly as a bank teller, Croft taught at a Palo Alto nursery school, and, in 1965, she set up the early childhood education program at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills. When De Anza opened in 1967, she started a similar program for grade-school teachers there and went on to write five education textbooks. She has also faced down death: in 1981, she was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer and underwent a double mastectomy.
Croft’s late-blooming dramatic career has come as an unexpected coda to an already full life. “Acting is one of the most satisfying experiences I’ve ever had,” she says. “And it was all serendipity.”
Not quite all. Croft is respected among her colleagues for dedication to her craft. Judy Weng, who directed Croft as a nosy landlady in the short comic film Apartment 8, says, “Artistically, Doreen is incredibly open, and she brought so much more to the character than I could have imagined. The first thing people say when they see the film is, where did you find that woman?”
With her new career now on track, Croft is determined that directors will keep on finding her. “I guess Asians really are hot,” she says with a laugh, “or at least, old Asians are.”
-- Jennifer Reese, ’88
